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Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Klimahaus Bremerhaven: in the world interior of climate

I recently visited the Klimahaus in Bremerhaven, northern Germany along with cultural anthropologist Werner Krauss. Klimahaus is a unique
museum dedicated to humanity's relationship to climate. The main body of the
museum leads visitors on a journey along the line of 8-degrees Longitude,
following a modern-day explorer as he heads south from Bremerhaven to
Switzerland, through Italy and the Sahara, into Cameroon, across the south
Atlantic and over Antarctica. From there visitors head across the Pacific,
calling in on Samoa and Alaska, before looping back to northern Germany at
Hallig Langeness. At each stop, visitors enter an exhibition dedicated to the
climate of the location, exploring its role in shaping human life and culture.
In a rather old-fashioned anthropological tradition, we are introduced to the
'customs and traditions' of the locals, while immersed in the heat or cold,
humidity or aridity of their climate.

Having introduced visitors to the dynamism and agency of
climate, the museum proceeds to a second main section dealing with 'Climate
Protection'. Here we learn about the history of the sciences of climate change,
and about policy options for preserving the stability of current climatic
conditions. Somewhat predictably, the policy options on show mostly concern the
enlightened individual making rational changes to their personal behaviour. As
Fred Turner has shown inThe
Democratic Surround, public exhibitions of
this immersive, multimedia sort have, in post-war western societies, often sought
to inculcate a particular kind of individualised democratic citizenship which
emphasises freedom of choice as both a right and a responsibility. Here,
this model of citizenship is extended to encompass individual responsibilities
for maintaining climatic stability.

Touring these exhibitions brought to mind Peter
Sloterdijk’s provocative arguments in In the World Interior of Capital. A companion piece to his landmark Spheres trilogy, the text offers a
philosophical theory of globalisation which explores how the globe has figured
in western thought and practice. In a nutshell, Sloterdijk delineates three
phases of globalisation defined by: the mathematical rationalisation of cosmological
space enabled by Greek geometry, and the coeval interest in spheres as
ontological and aesthetic perfection; the terrestrial globalisation of the
early modern age, with its maritime voyages of discovery and colonisation; and
the period since 1945 of ‘electronic globalisation’, facilitated by new
technologies which render globe-spanning communications instantaneous.

“What
distinguishes the three great stages of globalisation…are primarily their
symbolic and technical media: it makes an epochal difference whether one
measures an idealized orb with lines and cuts, sails around a real orb with
ships, or let aeroplanes and radio signals circulate around the atmospheric
casing of a planet.”

The second section of the book takes the figure of the
Crystal Palace, home of the Great Exhibition of 1851, as a metaphor for the
modernity brought about by this history of globalisation: the world interior of
capital. In this hothouse environment, the spoils of globalisation are brought
home, the moderns live in capitalist decadence, and the rest wait outside for
their turn to enter. The boundaries of the Crystal Palace are geographically
complex, made of discriminations, constituting a structure which, like Hardt
& Negri’s ‘Empire’,

Klimahaus

“is not a coherent architectural
structure; it does not resemble a residential building, but rather a comfort
installation with the character of a hothouse, or a rhizome of pretentious
enclaves and cushioned capsules that form a single artificial continent”

Climate has figured large in Sloterdijk’s recent thought.
His spherology project, concerned with the phenomenology of human spatiality and the construction of 'interiors' at multiple scales, has recently engaged with questions of climate change.
One of the outcomes of colonialism, Sloterdijk suggests, was the discovery of
the “world context”, meaning we now inhabit a “repercussion-infested
system”, as actions – such as emitting carbon – are seen to impact materially
on other people, beings and systems which may be spatially distant, but which
can be considered materially close.

The two main strands of Sloterdijk’s argument in the World Interior neatly map onto the two
main sections of the Klimahaus. In the first, we follow an ‘explorer’ boldly
setting out to discover spaces which do not belong to his own lifeworld.
Suitcase in hand, he embodies contemporary residues of the ‘Geography Militant’
culture which Felix Driver argues can be detected in diverse discourses and
media, a long time hence from its Victorian apogee. The presentation of other
cultures as situated timelessly within particular spaces and climates, displaying
ahistorical ‘customs and traditions’, recalls much earlier modes of knowing and
representing the anthropological Other. Critical climate scholars have observed
how climate change discourses have allowed the re-animation of problematic
tropes such as these, in rebooted forms of thought like climatic determinism. Yet this voyage which museum visitors are invited to take is
decidedly modern, despite its arcane insinuations. It is thematic, concerned
with climate above all else, illustrating what Sloterdijk describes as a shift
from “great actions” to “great themes” in the transition away from the age of
terrestrial globalisation. Here, climate both divides and connects; it explains
difference, but represents too a common thread of material connection which is
offered in the following exhibition as a political injunction.

The ‘Climate Protection’ section offers climate not as an
exterior space to be explored, but as part of a modern interior which must be
carefully calculated and managed. The symbolic media of this calculation are many
and varied: the ice core, the computer model, the ‘personal climate account’. But
amid these calculative rationalities uncertainties proliferate, which are
domesticated through personal stories from the future offered by characters we
met on our first voyage. The climatic spheres to be found lined up along
8-degrees Longitude have been disrupted; families torn apart, livelihoods
disrupted, lives lost. Stability gone, the boundaries of the Crystal Palace are
made more indeterminate, not least as human migration enters the narrative as a
mode of ‘adaptation’.

Proliferating statements from the climate bank

The setting of the museum itself is rich in suggestive symbolism.
It occupies a site on the quayside in what was once one of the hearts and
springboards of German oceanic expansionism. With the age of formal European
empires over, and notions of atmospheric globality firmly entrenched, the
quayside now plays host to climate as interior, rather than to those who,
suitcase in hand, once sought it as exterior. If enlightenment once began at
the docks, now we encounter something new; a gracefully bulbous glass and steel
construction which is home to both the Klimahaus, with its gathering together of the world’s
climates, and a Mediterranean-themed shopping mall, transporting consumers from
one maritime setting to another. Here, though, the Mediterranean climate does
not seem to have been simulated, just the aesthetics of a jumbled streetscape
in terracotta hues. For the warmth, one must buy a ticket at the Klimahaus, and
follow our explorer down to Italy.

Capturing something of "the drama of the
earth's disclosure as the carrier of local cultures” and its subsequent
“compression into an interconnected and foamed world context”, Klimahaus is a product of 20th century
atmospheric globality:

Climate control

“no globe we have ever seen shows the earth's atmosphere. Two dimensional
maps likewise provide views of airless territories...It was not until the 20th
century that the atmosphere was added once more and the objectified conditions
for human milieu-connectedness made nameable.”

20th
century explications of the atmospheric milieu can be traced, Sloterdijk
suggests in Terror from the Air, to
the rendering of the milieu as a military target in the first gas attacks on
the Western front in 1915. This process of progressive explication has also
seen microclimates come to figure as objects of control. Air conditioning, for
Sloterdijk, is much more than a domestic technology, but a variegated field of
human action whereby interiors of various sizes are conditioned to our
environmental whim, often benignly, promoting comfort; sometimes as a mode of
violence. But it is the more banal technologies of air conditioning which
allows the Klimahaus to gather together, or more accurately simulate, a
diversity of climates. If Sloterdijk’s epochal distinctions are founded upon
discrete ages’ symbolic and technical media, Klimahaus may be considered a
paragon of 21st century forms of globalisation.

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Welcome to Topograph

This blog was created by Helen Pallett & Martin Mahony in 2012 when we were PhD students at the University of East Anglia, and put into hibernation in 2016 when we moved onto new projects. The blog followed our musings on environmental science and policy, geography and social theory. Enjoy the archive!